


Crash Into Me

by LaTessitrice



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Echo - Freeform, F/M, When there's so little fic for a pairing you have to write it yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 03:26:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18160850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaTessitrice/pseuds/LaTessitrice
Summary: Max is going to blow out the town again unless Liz can find a way to calm him.





	Crash Into Me

**Author's Note:**

> I have been trying to write this for weeks but it was like pulling teeth. It was meant to be a simple smutfic but then episode six happened and these two wouldn't stop talking at each other. Then it all ended up being a lot softer (and cheesier, probably) than originally planned.
> 
> I wanted it written and posted before episode nine since writing for a live series is like walking on shifting sand - you never know when a new episode is going to render your idea useless. This isn't set at any particular time other than Liz knows what happened with Rosa, Isobel is out of her pod, and enough time/distance/plot has happened that Liz is not so angry at Max anymore.
> 
> Also, I had the title picked out before Carina said she'd have used it for the pilot. But it's perfect. Though I don’t actually know the original. Just the Stevie Nicks cover. This is very on brand for me.
> 
> Not beta'd so typos, grammar errors etc are my own. As is the abuse of italics and bad similes.

They’re out here on Isobel’s orders. 

The cabin is miles into the desert, down a dirt track that tested the limits of her car’s suspension. Not another soul around for miles, and Liz guesses that’s why Max is here—banished by his sister and not expecting Liz to follow him. And she wouldn’t have, not without Isobel’s firm instructions and gift of GPS coordinates.

But now they’re here, in this moment, with her hovering on the threshold. On the precipice of something, facing each other down. Miles from a source of live electricity, but with it still crackling between them like a storm about to blow, like the storm in the sky outside and above them—the tension Liz could have used to track Max here.

“What are you doing here?” His voice is rough, like it’s not been used in days. As if he’s just woken up, even though night has fallen around them like a cloak. He’s surprised, but wary, and Liz can hardly blame him.

“Isobel sent me.”

“Did she now.” He turns away with a shake of his head. As if the connection between them will ebb without eye contact. 

“ _You’re the only one who can calm him down_.” Isobel had told her. The subtext: _Do whatever you need to do to defuse my brother_. Because they’d all felt it building for days above Roswell, the skies a mirror to the trouble brewing inside Max. Isobel sent him away before he could blow out the entire town again. Or worse.

Liz could have ignored the instructions. Isobel hadn’t gotten into her head, just gave the order with her natural strength of will, one Liz has grown to match. But exiling Max wouldn’t fix the problem. If he’s ever going to come home, they have to do _something_.

Evidently, he disagrees. “You should go. I’m not safe to be around.”

She catches the way his gaze cuts to her right arm—where the skin is smooth, healed, free of the pattern of lightning fractals he’d once accidentally left there.

“I’m not in a circuit with an electrical source,” she points out. “I’m in no danger.”

He scoffs. “Is that so?” Because he’s not sure of himself, even with the best will in the world. She knows he won’t risk hurting her through the powers he knows little about and has less control over. It’s up to her to tear down his defenses, but she has conviction on her side. That and trust. It’s new, or at least newly regained, but it’s unwavering.

She’s still on the threshold, balanced between one dark world and the next: the moonlit desert and the shadows of the cabin, lit only by a few candles. Max himself is wreathed in those shadows as he guards the threshold.

“Can I come inside?” she asks.

“Why are you here?” 

“I told you. Isobel—”

“You never normally care what Isobel says. Why now?”

Is he really going to make her put it into words? “Let me in,” is all she says.

He lets her pass, closing the door behind her as if it will keep the storm outside. It won’t work; the storm is in here with them. The storm _is_ them.

“You once told me that you only felt calm around me,” she reminds him.

“You once told me you were terrified of me,” is his bitter response, throwing back her words from that awkward night in the Crashdown.

“That’s not true. I said I felt terrified. Not of you. In general. Of the situation. And honestly, a little bit of myself.”

He still won’t look at her. “You don’t need to make me feel better. I said you didn’t owe me anything and I meant it.”

“Maybe I’m here to put things right. Everything that Isobel did, everything that went wrong all those years ago—one of us has to do something to fix it. So. I’m here.”

He might think he’s hiding that glint of hope he swallows down when he turns away from her again, but he’s wrong. He’s always been easy for her to read. She can tell when he’s lying or hiding something from her—now he’s trying to mask his feelings again, but he’s too raw for it to work.

“So what is your grand plan?” he asks, busying himself by lighting more candles. It gives her chance to take in the spartan interior of the cabin: little more than a bed and chair, with a tiny kitchenette in one corner. Simple, rustic, but made cozier by a faded rug and patched-up blanket.

“What was yours? Meditating?”

His answering grunt suggests that actually, yeah, that was the entirety of his plan.

“Going well?” She can’t imagine it is, not when meditation requires a clear mind and focus. 

“Liz.” It’s a warning to back off, halfway to pleading. She’s pushing at him again, and she knows it only riles him up, but it might be the only way to get him to accept her help.

“Here’s an idea,” she says, changing tack. “We talk about whatever it is that’s causing this latest bout of emotional incontinence, and try to figure it out.”

“ _Liz_ ,” he pleads once more, and his mask of detachment fractures and falls away, leaving such raw, exposed vulnerability it steals her breath. She can’t break away from his gaze, and it’s like she’s tripped, fallen into a time loop, back into a conversation they’ve had before. They’re back in the blacked-out Crashdown and he’s looking at her like she hung the moon but then stole it away again. “Talking isn’t going to change anything.”

He throws himself into the chair, leaving her with nowhere to go except to perch on the edge of the bed. 

“It was easier when I thought you were leaving town again,” he continues, “because things could go back to how they were before. I wasn’t happy, but at least I wasn’t being tormented with looking at you everyday and knowing you didn’t want me.”

“That’s not—” She stops herself, unsure of how to finish. Maybe confess—to something she can’t even grasp, let alone voice? “It’s not about wanting. It’s more complicated than that. _You know it is_.”

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Max, I came back to town and found out most of my life had been a lie. And you were complicit in those lies. It’s been a lot.”

“I know. Why do you think I’m out here? I’m trying to not make it your problem.”

She sighs. “Here’s the thing: I think when it comes to you, it’s always going to be my problem. I don’t plan on leaving Roswell anytime soon and there’s no way I’m letting you move into this place, charming as it is. So where do we go from here?”

There’s a long pause where the shadowplay of emotions across his face is hidden by the flickering dance of candlelight. Then he lifts his head, jaw set in stubbornness. “You go home. I will work this out. Even if I have to release this—” he makes a vague gesture with his hand “—again, I’m far enough out of town it won’t cause any real damage.”

“Seriously? Are you going to take this conversation round in circles?”

“If you drove all the way out here hoping you’d be able to calm me, it’s not going to work. Did Isobel really send you out here with no plan—”

Whatever he sees on Liz’s face makes him stop.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” His face is in his hands, scrubbing, fingers tugging through his hair. Liz feels an answering urge in her own hands to to grab his hair too. “No! You’re not—not a scratching post I could just—”

She shrugs, trying to mask her own awkwardness with a dash of nonchalance. Pretend that she’d genuinely put some thought into the particulars before she got into her car and headed out here. “We’re adults. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

“Yes, it _does_.” He’s on his feet once more, quickly crossing the little cabin to pause in front of her. “I can’t be casual when it comes to you. I couldn’t touch you knowing you don’t…”

His hand is between them, halfway to cupping her face, and he freezes, staring down at the limb like it’s a traitor. It drops to his side and he flexes it into a fist. The passing tension in his jaw lets Liz know he was imagining what her skin would feel like if he’d touched her. She flushes in response, her cheeks warm with the ghost of that imagined caress.

She does the only thing she can. She reaches out and covers his fist with her own hand.

He drops to his knees before her with an exhale, and their fingers are interlaced, shifting, dancing together. He can’t look her in the eye, and honestly her own focus is on the places they meet, tiny points of connection where his rough skin grazes hers. His thumb strokes across her palm, barely there, but she feels it _everywhere_ , down to her toes and some dark, forgotten corner of her soul.

When he speaks it’s a mumble, lips hardly parting at all to let the words escape. “I love you. That won’t change. It’s never changed.” He swallows, finally meets her gaze again. She can’t breathe, chest full of something warm and insistent. His hand stills against hers. “And I can’t be with you in any way unless you feel something for me.”

He’s withdrawing physically as much as he is verbally. Liz grabs a fistful of t-shirt and keeps him in place.

“Isobel knows that,” she points out. “She knows you, and she knows me. And she thought the only solution was to send me after you. So what does that tell you?”

It tells Liz that she’s been in denial for a hell of a long time and she’s only just coming to realize it. It tells Liz that this is as big a deal for her as it is for Max: no take-backs, no do-overs. Even if she still can’t bring the words themselves to her lips, she feels her armor shaking loose, ruptured from the inside by her quaking emotions.

And Max has come to the same conclusion she has, the furrow between his brows smoothing out into surprise and then wonder. For a moment he looks like the boy she spent a carefree afternoon in the desert with, the boy she’d danced with and made such hopeful plans for the future with. The boy she’d refused to kiss because she’d known that for them, a kiss had to be the start of something epic.

“It tells me you feel something for me,” Max whispers, hope dripping from the revelation.

She nods but doesn’t reply with words. She’s done with words.

When she kisses him, it’s light, chaste. A test. Her eyes are open and she pauses, waiting for him to give any kind of indication he wants her to continue.

The sound he makes is not light or chaste. He kisses her back, and the way he kisses her isn’t chaste either. It’s a decade or more of longing poured into the fragile connection between them, the roughness of his slightly-chapped lips sending a wave of shivers through her. She forgets everything: where they are, why they’re here, his name—her _own_ damn name. Nothing is relevant except for the way his mouth moves against hers and the shattering it’s causing inside her.

Her armor’s dust.

The way he’d been crouched before her meant he’s cradled between her hips, and the kiss soon escalates from a connection of their mouths to a connection of everything. Her hands are in his hair, down his back, finding a path under his t-shirt. His fingers are splayed around her waist, twisting in her hair, cupping her face. They’re pressed close enough together to merge into one being.

Which, she reminds herself, is kind of the plan.

“I don’t want to rush things,” Max says, breaking off to plant a trail of kisses along her jawline.

“We have all night.” And beyond. She knows what he means—what’s been building between them won’t be served by being rushed. But she also wants all of him _right now_ and it’s hard to reconcile the two urges.

She shifts backwards onto the bed, taking him with her, and the kisses begin anew, just as frantic even though she can feel the way he’s fighting to slow things down, to take his time. So she gives him all the power, letting him taste and test and explore her mouth even as their hips start to roll against each other.

“This, off,” she commands, tugging at the hem of his shirt and setting off a frenzied race to get undressed: they’re a mess of tangled limbs and awkward positioning, and Max is more focused on getting her clothes off than his own. She finds herself giggling as he tries to wriggle out of his jeans, even as she allows herself to explore all his newly-exposed skin. 

He pauses, but he isn’t affronted: instead he’s wearing a wistful smile. “I never thought I’d hear you laugh again.”

She’s impatient; the smile is the only thing she wants him wearing. “You’ve got a lot of confidence for a semi-naked man who’s just been laughed at.”

He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, manages to get the jeans off and fling them across the room to join the rest of their abandoned clothes. She realizes he’s got _every_ right to be confident naked. 

He looks a little awestruck when he takes her in, and when he kisses her again, it’s softer, deeper. Even if he hadn’t repeatedly confessed his love for her, she’d know it by the way he kisses her, by the reverent way his hands move over her skin. She thinks he’s mapping her body, committing her to memory, and she’s trying to do the same, even if there’s a fever burning through her which demands more. 

Max might not be the mind reader in the family, but apparently he doesn’t have to be to know what Liz needs. His mouth and hands move south, fingers gliding between her thighs as his tongue and teeth do wicked things to the sensitive skin of her neck. 

It’s embarrassing how quickly she comes undone: she’s opens her mouth to beg him to hurry, and instead ends up keening his name. He doesn’t stop, delving in deeper as she clutches at the blanket, digging nails in to keep herself earthbound, because her soul is somewhere far above her body, still fighting its way back from the heavens it soared to when she came. The second time is just as intense, leaving her to melt into the bed, panting and sweat-drenched but not done yet. Far from it.

“Did you bring—” His question trails off, like he’s a teenage boy again, too shy to say the word aloud. 

She drags her teeth down one of his earlobes, feels his reaction jerk against her thigh. “Don’t need them. I’m on birth control and you can’t transmit pathogens.” Which is one of the least sexy things she’s ever said, but it doesn’t seem to dull Max’s enthusiasm.

His forehead rests against hers, both of their eyes open, gazes locked, as he braces on his arms above her and—oh, _yes_. There’s a pause, a moment of stillness where everything in the world feels right, where they breathe as one and acknowledge what it means for both of them.

“I love you,” he tells her, like it’s important, and it is. An answer bubbles up inside her, but gets caught somewhere between her lungs and her tongue, so instead she trails her fingers across the stubble on his cheek, urging him to continue. His gentle smile is understanding— _it’s okay, you don’t have to say it back_ —and he obeys.

Finding a rhythm together is easy, like the universe knows it owes them this much. Or maybe they were always meant to fit together like this. Whatever it is, Max can’t stop kissing her, his smile catching hers every few seconds, her name falling from his tongue in-between.

The intensity builds, the storm caught directly between them now, sweat-slicked skin easing the friction. She spills apart once more a moment before he does, power and pleasure surging from the point they are connected and out through her body, fizzing out into the atmosphere. She is stardust; she is lightning; she is a solar storm cresting.

When she comes back to herself, when she catches her breath, his face is buried in her neck. He’s a heavy weight above her, but it doesn’t last long enough to stop being a comforting weight before he’s rolling onto his back. She follows him.

She meant it when she told him they had all night, though at some point they doze. She wakes, draped across his chest, to a bright sliver of dawn creeping through the crack in the curtains. The sky is blue, bright cerulean, the storm clouds dissipated and that electric tension with it. 

She’s not sure if that’s a direct metaphor for her future with Max, but it’s a good omen. The permanent furrow between his brows has eased, and it takes years off his face—reminds her of the boy she walked away from a decade ago. She wonders if, somehow, they can unearth that boy from the layers of Max’s own armor.

The deep pattern of his breathing lulls her back to sleep in his arms.


End file.
